Sunday, May 03, 2009

Inspired by the rainbow cake made at Omnomicon, we attempted to make rainbow cupcakes today by the same method - just to see if it would work. The hardest part was finding the concentrated gel food colorings, but I finally located them at the largest grocery store in our area. Then the fun began with 6 bowls of colored cake batter (just using a standard cake mix):

Dropped in rainbow order into the center of cupcake thingies:

The final batter appearance:

The view after baking:

And much to our surprise, slicing one open revealed a perfect inverted rainbow! Hurrah! (Now I wonder how it would look with uncolored batter to start and end the rainbow so it would have white in the middle instead of the solid purple center):

The most important part of cleanup is having an assistant standing by to lick the frosting off the beaters:

In my own childhood I remember the batter always tasted better than the cake. Licking it off the beaters was the second best way of getting it -- the best was off a rubber spatula, the few times my mother allowed it.